Church Marketing Designs that Work and are Affordable: d2designs

I first met Paul Loyless on Twitter. It doesn’t happen often, but Paul and I were able to run together at a conference a year or so ago and I instantly fell in love with his heart and vision for the church. Paul heads a marketing company for churches and church plants called d2designs. Check out the site…I think they do amazing work.

I believe in Paul and his company and wanted you to know about them. If your church needs help with marketing, especially if you are a small church or church plant on a budget, I recommend the services of d2design and Paul Loyless.

Here is an interview I recently did with Paul:

Paul, you have a unique business. Having met you personally, I know your heart is more about building the Kingdom and less about profits. What drives you to specialize in churches?:

We are asked this question all the time and my response is always the same – I love the local church and I love pastors. More specifically I love small churches and church planters. While neither of them are perfect it is who God is using to call people to him and I want to see them communicate clearly and with excellence. It blows my mind that over the past 10 years I’ve been able to make a living doing this.

How do you judge whether your work with a church has been successful?:

My answer may surprise you. Most agencies gauge their success with how creative or cool their portfolio is. Not us. The only measuring stick we have is this…. have we helped the church clearly communicate their vision and message?

What advice would you give to a church or church plant who has never really considered marketing, but may be concerned about the expense?:

You are going to pay. There’s just no avoiding it. You will either pay with cash or you will pay with time. Most under resourced pastors (planters or small church pastors) think they can save money by doing it themselves or having a friend or family member do it for them. The ending is almost always the same: an inferior product and strained relationships. Marketing and branding are fun and exciting – no doubt about it. But God has called you to a community to preach His word, love on people and spend time in prayer and fasting for you community. That’s your calling – don’t fall into the black hole of branding and marketing.

I would also advise pastors to beware of the silver bullet solution. There are a lot of companies that have crept up in this space making empty promises to pastors that if they will just use their (insert widget here) that their church will grow 300% in a year just like the other churches they have worked with. It just isn’t going to happen.

Where should they start?:

Great question and the most important one. Start with a plan. We’ve created a great exercise called “5 Steps for Creating a Church Marketing Plan” that walks a pastor and/or leadership team through a process for creating a marketing plan. Most pastors skip this step and it is absolutely the most important step for creating a clear identity and vision. Once you know who you are and where you are going, creating the strategy for getting there is much easier.

Sometimes at a restaurant I ask the waitress to suggest an item from the menu for me. Considering what you have to offer as a company, pick one product and tell me why you would recommend it for me.:

Any chance I can order a two course meal here Ron? If so, I would start with ConnectFirst. It’s our new mover outreach program that connects churches with new movers in the community. It’s a solution we have that can benefit ALL readers.

IdentityPaks would be the main course. We wanted to create a solution for church planters and pastors of small churches with limited resources to have access to a quality comprehensive visual brand from web site to print materials. It took almost eighteen months of tweaking and improving the solution until we were able to bring the solution to the church planter at the lowest cost. We are thrilled with the solution and just as excited to see how positively planters and pastors of small churches are responding to it.

Need some marketing for your church or church plant? Contact Paul today!

(Full Disclosure: Paul did not pay for this post. I asked him for this interview. Paul has advertised on my blog, but I believe strongly in his services and would have posted this anyway, as I do frequently for causes and services I use or believe in personally.)